This Blog Is About Political Correctness

Yeah, this one is really, really old in internet terms (I first wrote part of this on May 20th.) and am coming back to it now as a way to get something out soon, because I'm lost inside my own head around the death of Iain Steele and the community's response to it. His death is tragic, but the reaction to it, I think, is going to continue that cycle of tragedy and really, all that's gonna happen is a sad cycle of emasculating males for admitting they have feelings.

And that's (along with depression) what made it easy to pick on Iain Steele and the major contributing factor to Iain's suicide. So, instead, this one is about being politically correct and people who don't recognize their own privilege.




So I've been on the internet today, reading and synthesizing, trying to figure out what I want to do and I ended up on Kotaku's not-forum Talk Amongst Yourselves and kind of predictably, I ended up talking about Resident Evil 5, N'Gai Croal and racism. That, and oddly enough, political correctness.

I've had a lot of interactions with that epithet, most of it aimed at me. Majority of the time, it's by other people who are white males saying "You're too much of a buzzkill." Or, "you're thinking too much". I hate that last one especially. Really, it's one of the few things I actively dislike. (I passively dislike much of this planet.) Sometimes, it's called for, I think. Most of the time, though, it isn't. I'm not thinking too much, you're not thinking enough, I think.

The comment that got me was "political correctness is becoming a tumour, it stifles creative licence and frowns at the outlandish, Housewives of America need to get a life and the people who jump on the racism band wagon at any available chance need to wake up and smell the bacon."

I think he's wrong. Political correctness is not a tumor, it's one of the few things that gives me hope about our society. Political correctness is a start to a wider recognition that not everyone comes from the same perspective. I think he's missed the point. The point is not to stifle creativity but instead to try to speak in a way that doesn't passively disenfranchise whole groups of people not being "normal". I've given it some thought and I have decided that I'm not sorry, not one bit, for, in Jay Smooth's words, making people think about how their words affect people.

And I don't know if the person believes that having to respect other people's perspectives and lives is so incredibly difficult that it's easier just to assume they "don't mean it like that", but like the wise man said, in any healthy relationship, the closer you get, the more you know and respect other people's boundaries and that's what being politically correct is.

Political correctness is about showing respect and humility towards people with a different history than you. From what I understand, political correctness is supposed to be about respecting the humanity of people who aren't like you. Political correctness, so far as I can tell, is supposed to be about understanding how we affect each other and caring more about how that happens, not as a euphemism for smarminess and insincerity.

I guess I've got a fondness for different perspectives. One of the first songs I geeked out to had a chorus that said no one will ever be like me and six years later, I found that chorus again in a hip-hop song and it brought me back to punk rock and now, I see it again in an argument on the internet. Everyone's perspective is unique. That doesn't mean each perspective is meaningfully different, but that there is more than one overarching one is one of the points of political correctness and being careful with one's language.

Respect isn't dead, but there sure are people who want to shoot it in the head.